Jeremy Hunsinger's homepage and blog

scos presentation proposal

I proposed this for the annual standing conference on organizational symbolism conference http://www.scos.org/iframe-5/index.html “serious fun”… and it was accepted. it is a spin off the darknets research i’ve been pursuing on the side for a year… so now there are two papers in development on this topic… I’m sharing it so people can see more clearly some of the topics that i engage with for ‘fun’.

Toying with governance: darknets, surveillance, and resistance
By jeremy hunsinger

This paper argues that ethics of playful hacking as a mode of resistance that operate within and through internet systems counteracts government control of the darknets. Specifically, I argue that as governments seek more surveillance and control over the internet, they will have less control of technical elites, who in a mode of playful jouissance construct oppositional technologies.

Darknets are securitized internet networks that operate either over existing networks through encrypted traffic on those networks, or increasingly they are mixes of those networks and either planned or ad-hoc mesh networks. Mesh networks are computer to computer networks that route date across, by routing it through the computers themselves sans intermediation by the internet. While these darknets exist within and through the commercial internet, their traffic can be governed by the commercial providers and the governments that govern those providers, mesh routing bypasses even that control and forces a different strategy to address the governance of content and its distribution. This new strategy for surveillance and control of media is device based monitoring, but even that might be bypassed by using non-standard operating environments.

Thus I conclude that given the socio-technical parameters of future darknets, that the governments who seek to regulate and control content on the internet are forced into position of either hypersurveillance of individual devices or to abdicate monitoring and content provision to the communities themselves.

However, no matter how the government constructs the system of governance, the playful mode of resistance will enable the creative re-creation of darknets and other securitizing technics that will allow darknet technologies.